In a recent note to its employees, Amazon has hinted at more job firings in the coming years. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, has articulated a clear vision for the company’s future in a recent letter to his employees. The letter indicated an intensified focus on artificial intelligence (AI) that will lead to substantial changes in its workforce, which include potential reductions in corporate job roles.
Jassy emphasised the pervasive integration of AI across Amazon’s vast operations, noting its application “from Alexa to shopping features and internal operations.” He characterised generative AI as a “once-in-a-lifetime” technological advancement that could bring more possibilities for both consumers and enterprises.
“Technologies like Generative AI are rare; they come about once in a lifetime, and completely change what’s possible for customers and businesses. So, we are investing quite expansively, and, the progress we are making is evident. You can see it in what we’re rolling out in Alexa+, our next generation Alexa personal assistant that’s meaningfully smarter, more capable, and is the first personal assistant that can take significant actions for customers on top of providing intelligent answers to virtually any question,” said Jassy.
“You can see it with our AI shopping assistant that’s being used by tens of millions of customers around the world to discover new products and make more informed purchase decisions,” he added
AI to displace Amazon corporate jobs
Jassy went on to focus on how Amazon is utilising generative AI to make its internal operations more efficient. “We’re also using Generative AI broadly across our internal operations. In our fulfillment network, we’re using AI to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots—all of which have improved cost to serve and delivery speed. We’ve rebuilt our Customer Service Chatbot with GenAI, providing an even better experience than we’d had before. And, we’re assembling more intelligent and compelling product detail pages from leveraging GenAI,” he said.
However, Jassy hinted at how the adoption of AI will affect the workforce. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he said, “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he added.
As an advice to his employees, Jassy added, “As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
